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Investigating the determinants of environmental sustainability has become a very attractive and popular area of research in response to the United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDGs) and COP26 targets. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to explore the effects of renewable energy, technological innovation, and the insurance market on environmental sustainability in the United States (US). This work contributes to the extant body of knowledge by exploring the effect of the insurance market on the load capacity factor (LC), specifically regarding the US. The LC tracks a certain ecological threshold by simultaneously comparing biocapacity and ecological footprint (EF), thereby providing a comprehensive empirical analysis of ecological sustainability determinants. However, this proxy includes the combined attributes of the demand and supply sides of ecological sustainability. Using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag method, this research reveals that the insurance market adversely affects the LC in the US. The overall outcomes highlight the positive role of renewable energy, technological innovation, and the insurance market in achieving the SDGs and COP26 targets. Policy recommendations for policymakers concerning promoting renewable energy, green innovation activities, the green insurance market, and ecological regulations are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does one begin to value water? Water is valued today more than ever and yet it is still vastly undervalued because it is required to sustain life.1 Water is critical to the production of energy, and since energy drives economies and industrial production, water is the most powerful commodity in the world. People take clean water and the availability of water for granted. Numerous factors and important considerations determine the value of water, and the rights and responsibilities we have to provide safe, cost-effective, and reliable access to it. This paper will present issues that water professionals are grappling with that affect the water renewal industry and how the industry must lead the discussion to educate the public, and support technology and innovation to ensure that clean and safe water is a resource accessible to all, sustainable, and properly valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photovoltaic is emerging as a cost-competitive source of energy generation and has experienced a decade of substantial cost decline. Recognizing that innovation in sustainable technologies can substantially contribute to the sustainable generation of energy, the federal government, universities, and industries in the USA have invested considerably in innovative solar technologies involving photovoltaic energy generation. However, the association between innovations in photovoltaic energy generation, distribution, or transmission-related technologies (IPVEGRT) and carbon dioxide emissions is unclear. The present study significantly contributes to energy economics by inspecting the nexus between IPVEGRT and carbon dioxide emissions, renewable energy consumption, the expansionary monetary policy, international collaboration in green technology development, gross domestic product per capita, and trade openness in the USA from 1990Q1 to 2018Q4. The results indicate that IPVEGRT helps reduce carbon dioxide emissions. International collaboration in green technology development and renewable energy consumption was negatively associated with carbon dioxide emissions, while expansionary monetary policy, gross domestic product per capita, and trade openness were positively associated with carbon dioxide emissions. The two-way causality between IPVEGRT and carbon dioxide emissions and between international collaboration in green technology development and carbon dioxide emissions was validated. Finally, a one-way causality between expansionary monetary policy, carbon dioxide emissions, gross domestic product per capita, and carbon dioxide emissions was validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to reduce energy use and cut emissions that contribute to climate change, countries need to radically reinvent their fossil-fuel intensive transportation systems. As a major consumer of energy and contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the U.S. transportation sector faces extraordinary challenges in the twenty-first century. Transportation in the U.S. depends heavily on fossil-fuel dependent cars and planes to the near exclusion of more energy-efficient electric trains. In order to address this concern, some policy makers refer to “technological optimism” which seeks no systemic change but instead focuses on employing technology to reduce the energy demand and environmental impact of the status quo. On the other hand, some researchers suggest a systematic paradigm shift away from cars and planes to intermodal systems that improve the sustainability of the system as a whole. High-speed rail (HSR) is arguably such an investment that can further this shift and help to achieve a more diversified and balanced transportation system. In this respect, by largely examining the role of the U.S. cars and planes “culture” in the economy, this paper elaborates on how building a HSR system may help U.S. advance towards environmental sustainability in transportation, make a break from the status quo, and create a more balanced, multimodal transportation system that will improve the quality and efficiency of travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patents have long been assumed to provide firms with competitive advantage, but longitudinal results suggest that some types of patent content provide more enduring advantage than others do. The duration of advantage appeared to wane with time in the highly-dynamic U.S. communications-services industry during a period when technological changes occurred rapidly within it (1998-2012). Results suggest patents integrating technology streams that were different from the technologies of focal-patents' grants contributed more to sustaining firms' profit margins during this period than did focal patents that exploited extant technological knowledge. We found that firms who continually pushed their organization's knowledge envelope outward to incorporate more unknown technologies sustained higher profit margins for a longer duration of time than did firms whose patented inventions were predominantly incremental-even within difficult settings where competition grew so intense that firms' average operating margins were deteriorating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As of 2015, the American entertainment market was worth about $600 billion, and it is projected to substantially exceed that figure in coming years. The global entertainment industry is worth about $2 trillion, meaning the U.S. is responsible for over a quarter of total global entertainment revenue. These statistics illustrate the staggering impact of the American entertainment industry on the global markets for film, television, and music. The American music industry is particularly dominant in its global market, earning half of world-wide sync revenues and accounting for nearly a third of all global music revenue. Entertainment is clearly the United States' chief cultural export and has a profound effect on the country's international image. The figures above show the integral position of American media in the global market and the importance of studying and understanding the entertainment industries. Because of the country's influential role in media, U.S. copyright law, as it pertains to these industries, has a significant impact on the fundamental structures of both domestic and international entertainment business. However, a large portion of the common dialogue surrounding issues in U.S. copyright law can be dominated by vague policy arguments rather than more objective economic analysis. This article seeks to blend the policy-based and empirical perspectives, exploring the implications of U.S. copyright law on artistic culture and creative industry itself as an economic system. It will focus on the particularly fickle and confusing area of "music law" and how the current framework is inapplicable to modern music culture and destructive to the music industry as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how activists' public and private politics elicit different organizational responses. Using data on U.S. petroleum companies from 1982 to 2010, we investigate how climate change activists serving as witnesses at congressional hearings and engaging in firm protests influenced firms' internal and external responses. We find that public politics induced internally focused practice adoption, whereas private politics induced externally focused framing activities. We also find that private and public politics had an interaction effect: as firms faced more private political pressure, they were less likely to respond to public political pressures; similarly, as firms faced greater public political pressure, they were less likely to respond to private political pressures. The results suggest that activists can have a significant impact on firm behavior depending on the mix of private and public political tactics they engage in. We discuss the implications of our study for social movement research, organization theory, and nonmarket strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A potential solution for weakened rural economies is the development of local food systems, which include affordable foods sources for consumers and economically feasible structures for producers. Local food systems are purported to promote sustainability, improve local economies, increase access to healthy foods, and improve the local diets. Four entrepreneurial food systems innovations that support local economies include farmers' markets, community supported agriculture, farm to institution programs and food hubs. We review current literature to determine whether innovations for aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing in local food systems: 1) enable producers to make a living; 2) improve local economies; 3) provide local residents with greater access to affordable, healthy food; and 4) contribute to greater consumption of healthy food among residents. While there is some evidence for each, more transdisciplinary research is needed to determine whether entrepreneurial food systems innovations provide economic and public health benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every day, new innovations move us toward a mobile, always-accessible Internet. In this time of rapid technological change, the challenge for any new regulation of the Internet is sustainability: to craft rules that can adapt to and withstand the constant evolution in technology and network structure. This comment analyzes the Open Internet Order, the latest attempt by the FCC to protect Internet neutrality and openness, through the lens of regulatory sustainability. In the Order, the FCC has decided to regulate "mobile" ISPs less than their "fixed" ISP counterparts. Critics worry that this lesser regulation of mobile Internet will create a foundation of discriminatory practices by mobile broadband providers who could take advantage of the lax regulation and block specific content and applications. Missing from these critiques, however, is a clear understanding of the repercussions on the sustainability of these regulations caused by dividing Internet providers into separate categories. This comment argues that in using the categories of 'fixed" and "mobile, " the FCC continues its flawed tradition of placing communications technologies into distinct regulatory silos that become unwieldy when new hybrid technologies erode the differences between those silos. We are heading towards a convergence of networks, where wireless and fixed-line networks will combine to form one overarching network that caters to all endpoints, stationary or moving. This convergence of networks will result in the Order's distinctions between "fixed" and "mobile" becoming obsolete. This comment argues that the FCC should reject its ex-ante fixed category-based approach in the Order and rely on a more flexible, ex-post adjudicatory system to create sustainable regulations for the future. This comment proposes one such solution to ensure that the Order remains sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]